Microsoft Dumps Developers And May Be Injecting AI Into File Explorer

They’re Definitely Not On The Ball-mer Anymore

The layoffs at Microsoft took out a large number of developers, according to The Register.  This will be very depressing for anyone who needs to rely on Microsoft at work as the quality of their products has suffered over the past couple of years and this move will certainly not improve that situation.  The cuts were originally touted by Microsoft CFO Amy Hood were to focus on middle management but it certainly wasn’t limited to them.  If you were hoping that the Faster CPython project would arrive to make your life easier you are in for disappointment as many of the cuts were Python developers and the project has been cancelled completely.

The rumour is that this indicates Microsoft will be following the latest trend of replacing developers with AI and having LLMs spit out code.  While the code that LLMs produce is not uniformly awful it often has serious issues as they depend on data pulled from the intertubes and as anyone who works on code knows, the web is not just full of bad coding suggestions, the official documentation is often out of date and includes deprecated features which no longer work.  This rumour is not proven, and amusingly the layoffs also included Gabriela de Queiroz, the director of AI, Microsoft for Startups.

That’s not the only possible AI initiative Microsoft is undertaking, they are also testing injecting AI directly into File Explorer with a feature called AI actions.  The latest Dev build of Windows 11 now features four new options when you right click on a picture, it will use Bing visual search to find similar images on the web, let you blur the background and erase objects like in the Photos app, and remove the background like you can do in Paint.  Instead of launching those apps to preform those tasks they will be all be incorporated into the right click menu.

That’s not all the future holds, reportedly Microsoft is now testing a feature to summarize documents stored in OneDrive or SharePoint, or to quickly create AI-generated lists from files.  These will use Copilot, so you should have more than a few concerns about using those proposed features on proprietary documents as you never know where they will end up after Copilot gets hold of them.  Since the new AI features may well be developed by an AI privacy is unlikely to be heavily weighted as a priority.